Along with a lot of glitz, glamour, and colored lights (not to mention freely flowing drinks), ATI's  product launch party for the Radeon 7500, 8500, and FireGL 8800 at Paramount Studios featured many demos showing off the power and functionality of these new graphics boards.

Having had a chance to spend some time with the demos at the launch party and at ATI's Siggraph 2001 booth, I can honestly say that they are extraordinarily impressive.  The Radeon 8500 is a very powerful and flexible graphics processor and these demos really show off some of the cooler capabilities of the card.  What follows below is Part I of the screenshots, DiVX encoded videos, and explanations we received showing off each of the launch demos.  This first installment will give you a taste of some of the demos targeted at specific features of the Radeon.  Part II will include the movies of the waterfall demo, the Rachel demo, and the Radeon Islands demo, which is the Radeon 8500s storyline demo which ties all the effects together like we saw in Radeon's Ark, as well as more information.

A couple things I'd like to point out up front are that many of these demos will ship with the RADEON 8500 boards in September.  Also, ATI has listened to your feedback on previous demos such as Radeon's Ark, and many of the demos will have interactive modes that will allow you to fly around and explore the virtual environments.

I'd like to thank ATI, and Jason Mitchell from ATI Research in particular for helping get us the demo CD and information so quickly.  Much of the information below is ripped straight from the information included with the demo CD.

-Ichneumon

SMARTSHADER™ Treasure Chest Demo
 

        The RADEON 8500 SMARTSHADER™ Treasure Chest demo was used in the 1.4 Pixel Shader presentation at the Microsoft Meltdown developer events in Seattle, London and Tokyo.  This demo uses single-pass rendering for all polygons in the scene, illustrating a variety of shading techniques which are only possible with the 1.4 Pixel Shader support unique to the RADEON 8500.

Diffuse Bump Mapping (floor and wood) and Bumped Cubic Environment Mapping (metal)	Brushed metal chalice done with anisotropic lighting and bump mapping	Bumped Cubic Environment Mapping

Ghost Shader	Four per-pixel lights in one pass	Real-time per-pixel reflection and refraction

1.4 Pixel Shader Demo Movies from Tokyo Meltdown

• Four movies of the demo taken during the Tokyo Meltdown presentation are available from VMag Online

Waterfall Demo
 

The RADEON 8500 Waterfall Demo shows off two different water effects:

Waterfall Particle System drawn with Point Sprite Primitives	Dynamic Reflection and Refraction Mapping

Particle System Rendered with Point Sprites

        The spray from the waterfall is rendered with 4,000 point sprite primitives per frame (plus an additional 4,000 for the reflection of the waterfall in the river).  Point Sprites, are a new feature exposed in DirectX 8.0 and fully supported by the RADEON 8500.  Point Sprites are designed to be drawn in large numbers like this to simulate particle phenomena like mist, fire, sparks or dust.  This particular scene was inspired by the Santa Clara Falls scene in the non-real-time Flow animation by Gavin Miller.  The particles are emitted at the top of the falls and their movements are calculated by the engine every frame as they fall and bounce off of the rocks in the scene.

Dynamic Projective Reflection and Refraction Mapping

        The waves on the surface of the flowing river above and below the waterfall are simulated using a combination of a vertex shader (to generate the large undulating waves) and a pixel shader (to compute the dynamic reflection and refraction).  The dynamic reflection and refraction maps are rendered every frame so that the reflected and refracted light is accurate from the point of view of the viewer and to capture any animation in the scene (such as the swimming fish, which also jump out of the water).  The geometry above the water (i.e. the part of the world that you would see reflected in the water) is drawn into a reflection map.  The geometry beneath the surface of the water, including the animated fish, is drawn into a refraction map.  In the image below, the maps are drawn overlayed on the final scene so that you can see what's going on:

Dynamic Reflection and Refraction Maps (inset)

        In the top left of the screen you see the reflection map.  Note that you can see the waterfall spray upside down in this texture map.  In the top right of the screen you can see the geometry beneath the water, including three of the animated fish.

        When the surface of the water is drawn, a vertex shader is used to simulate the large undulating waves.  For the smaller, more detailed waves, two separate scrolling bump maps are composited to simulate constructive and destructive interference of waves on the surface of the water.  This composite bump map is then combined with the ray from the eye to index into the reflection and refraction maps as they are projected onto the water geometry.  A Fresnel term is also computed per-pixel to simulate the property of water that makes it appear more reflective the more edge-on it is viewed.  This water shader simulates refraction and reflection in real-time with unprecedented accuracy and is simply not possible without 1.4 pixel shaders.

Wet Rocks

    One last touch in this demo is the shader that is used on the rocks on the edges and in the middle of the river:

        On the left edge of the river, you can see the specular (shiny) reflections off of the rocks near the surface of the water.  This uses a specular bump map to give just that little added touch of realism by making the rocks appear slick and wet.

More Screenshots

On to Part II >>